The Cosmic Geometer

“So far, we have found no matching circles,” says Glenn Starkman, one of the circle searchers. Starkman, who broke ground on his universe-topology work at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, is spending his sabbatical from Case Western in Cleveland at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva. He and his team are running new tests of the computer coding to be doubly sure the circles would have been found if they were there – it’s possible that galactic contamination obscured their results. He estimates they will have a definitive answer soon.

Weeks and his team, meanwhile, are at once sticking to their proposition and exploring other options, such as the possibility of a universe that is finite in some directions and infinite in others. “You don’t want to ignore the other possibilities,” says Weeks. “But personally, I’m not quite ready to declare the circles missing.”

The dodecahedron universe, if it holds up, has implications for quantum mechanics and theories of the big bang and, even more promisingly, for a deeper and more beautiful understanding of the blinking night sky and the potential of travelling into its depths. “Hypothetically,” says Weeks, “if you head off into a dodecahedral universe you would travel in a straight line and come back to the starting point. But it would take a long, long time.”

The model also leaves us with a new question: If the universe is finite, what is beyond? “Nothing,” says Weeks, “but it is a very profound nothing. The best answer to that question is to make the question go away.” And with a bit of elaborate reasoning, he can.